Chicken House longlist extract: Sleepwell and Fly

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We’re running extracts from the 16 longlisted authors in The Times/Chicken House competition to find a great children’s writer. Fletcher Moss tells the story of two teenage “poison boys” - orphans who taste food for the idle rich - who live in the shadowy city of Highlions

A young woman was sitting in a copper bath, the steam rising about her. She
was pointing a pistol at his face.

“Kite!” she whispered. The pistol wavered in her hand at the sight of him. The
fear in her voice was alive in her eyes and tight in her throat as she
swallowed. There was a pause. Her composure seemed to return. “I will shoot
you if you move” she said more firmly.

Her eyes were dark and her hair in black ringlets, wet and sticking to her
shoulders. Her skin was gleaming in the steam and candlelight. Dalton